151–160 of 234 posts
Thankfully there is still email, which never went down globally
Email is slowly becoming centralised unfortunately as small providers are pushed out by big companies. So it won't be long until we have global email outages.
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A non-standardized, homebrew encryption scheme does not necessarily have to be worse than a standardized algorithm - even though it often is. But if implemented correctly and by someone who knows what they are doing, I'd trust a homebrew algo more than one which has been approved by the west's codebreakers for general use.
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1. https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram
2. https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS
Time to talk about matrix.org and Element not Signal and definitely not Telegram...
I'm sorry but matrix is a convoluted mess. Speaking from experience, when there's a deep focus on protocols and technical architecture before usability it becomes incredibly hard for the consumer side to get started. It's still very much a DIY thing and the promise of Element hosted offerings kind of just defies the point of the federated design for what most came into it for, self hosting. Honestly, we just need a d…
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A non-standardized, homebrew encryption scheme does not necessarily have to be worse than a standardized algorithm - even though it often is. But if implemented correctly and by someone who knows what they are doing, I'd trust a homebrew algo more than one which has been approved by the west's codebreakers for general use.
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I also would like to point out how your false dichotomy leaves no legitimate position when arguing against NSA-approved encryption mechanisms for the general public.
From a security perspective, I don't care if open source is solving the backdoor problem - the use of NSA-approved algorithms is the problem, not the source code availability.
From a civics perspective, I find potentially insecure algorithms that can be broken into by more local governments a lot more problematic than insecure algorithms that have a backdoor for governments far removed from, and ideally antagonistic to, my own if my own government cannot read it. The government of China or Russia is unlikely to abduct me in the night to put me into a black site. My own, or their American "friends", are a lot more likely to do so.
If you have a counter-argument other than another ad hominem, I'm happy to hear it.
Time to talk about matrix.org and Element not Signal and definitely not Telegram...
Thankfully there is still email, which never went down globally
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You can enable e2e chats. But you lose cloud sync. > Also, being based in the UAE doesn't inspire confidence on the privacy and security front... Well the 5 eyes do not inspire confidence either, and that's where whatsapp is based. And Apple has plans to automatically inform law enforcement from device scans. At least telegram client is open source so that is unlikely to happen on the client side directly.
> You can enable e2e chats. But you lose cloud sync. You also lose talking to more than 1 person at the same time.
Also AFAIK Telegram has access to the plain text data from stickers so when they are downloaded by a person on a secret chat, everybody with server access can also figure a bit of the context of the conversation.
Wife just received account registration sms that new device has been registered. Anyone else experiencing that? Error? Worse?
Even though I do have WhatsApp I wouldn't have noticed without this HN headline. Everyone I message with is via iMessage or Signal nowadays and I only have WhatsApp because I am part of a few sports clubs which have a WhatsApp group but we don't chat enough for me to notice a downtime like today. Makes me happy to see how I've actually managed to rid myself of WhatsApp for the most part.
WhatsApp is end to end encrypted and AFAIK now has encrypted backups. iMessage intentionally preserves a backdoor in its crypto so that the FBI can read approximately every iMessage sent/received without a warrant, should they so desire.
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> your shoulds They are not mine. It's not my data that is being mined and it's not my business that can disappear if WhatsApp goes offline. Yeah, I'm fully aware that people generally don't care about any of that. Lots of people also don't care about their eating habits, the effects of their economic actions, etc, etc. But if they don't want to face the bad consequences of their choices, they should .
Therefore the idea will continue to flounder indefinitely, used by a microscopically small user base representing a microscopically small niche of the market. In effect it doesn’t exist and has negligible impact on the bigger picture. But at least you get to feel like you did the right thing, right?
I have no control over what others do. The only power I have is over my own choices.
> But at least you get to feel like you did the right thing, right?
I am more concerned about not doing the wrong thing (if I can avoid it) then any display of righteousness.
In the case, no one is forcing me to use WhatsApp, so if I can avoid being a participant in something that I believe to be hurtful to me and others, I will. The inconvenience is a small price to pay.